The Life and Legacy of Russell Kirk

The Life and Legacy of Russell Kirk

In the book of Ecclesiasticus it is written: "Let us
now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us." We gather
today to honor the memory of a famous man, a man who earned his
fame by writing about those who, in an intellectual and spiritual
sense, were our fathers. In the great chain of being that we call
Western civilization, Russell Kirk was a sturdy link.

Some years ago, a young libertarian wrote a book entitled It
Usually Begins with Ayn Rand. I do not know how many young
conservatives in 2007 would say that their intellectual awakening
began with the books and essays of Russell Kirk. But certainly many
in this room can testify to his influence and especially to the
impact of his masterful book, The Conservative Mind.

As most everyone in this audience knows, The Conservative
Mind was Russell Kirk's magnum opus. More than 50 years after
its publication, it remains in print in several languages. For most
scholars, the publication of a book of this distinction would be
the culmination of a career. For Kirk, who was only 34 at the time,
it was just an opening salvo. In the years to come, he founded two
influential journals (Modern Age and The University
Bookman); published a regular column for more than two decades
in National Review; wrote a major biography of T.S. Eliot
and a classic history entitled The Roots of American
Order; did more than anyone living to revive Edmund Burke as a
fountainhead of conservative thought; completed a superb memoir
called The Sword of Imagination; and churned out a
prodigious torrent of other writings.

How prodigious? According to Charles Brown, who has just
completed a comprehensive bibliogra­phy of Kirk's works, Dr.
Kirk wrote 26 nonfiction books, 9 volumes of novels and collected
short stories, 255 book reviews, 68 introductions and forewords to
other peoples' books, 814 essays and short pieces published in
periodicals, and nearly 3,000 newspaper columns. Among all the
founding fathers of modern American conservatism, only William F.
Buckley Jr. rivaled him in productivity.

Surely, a man of such phenomenal intellectual output and
versatility deserves to be honored, and so Kirk has been and
continues to be. Here at The Heritage Foundation you will find a
portrait of him on the wall. If you exercise your imagination a
little, you may hear echoes of his voice in the Heritage auditorium
where he delivered more than 50 lec­tures in a little over a
decade.

Sometimes it is hinted that Kirk is slowly becom­ing a
forgotten figure. The evidence suggests other­wise. Many of his
books remain in print, and others are in the pipeline for
republication. Today we cele­brate the most recent addition to
his bibliography: a collection of his most outstanding essays,
impres­sively edited by Professor George Panichas.[1] The
title of this volume, The Essential Russell Kirk, is
dou­bly meaningful. It suggests, first, that the essays therein
contain the essence of Kirk's teaching, and, secondly, that Kirk
himself is essential-essential to American conservatism. I hope you
will read this splendid volume and agree.

No, Kirk has not been forgotten, nor is he likely to be anytime
soon. And yet there is a sense, at least in some corners of the
American Right, that in 2007, 13 years after his passing, Kirk has
come to be a figure more admired than studied. Some observers have
suggested that much of the praise heaped upon Kirk since his death
has been "empty homage" by people who covet his prestige but care
little for his teaching. Others lament that American higher
education-the recurrent target of Kirk's fusil­lades-seems more
degraded than ever, at least by the standards Kirk struggled to
uphold.

Is Kirk's conservatism, then, a "live option" for Americans in
2007? To put it another way: Is Russell Kirk still essential?
Before we can ponder these ques­tions, we need a clearer sense
of just what kind of conservatism he espoused and of where he fits
in the jigsaw puzzle of modern American conservatism.

Bookish and Precocious
To understand his message, we need to know the messenger. Who was
Russell Kirk? He was born in 1918 in the village of Plymouth,
Michigan, a few miles outside Detroit. His father was a railroad
engi­neer who dropped out of school before the sixth grade. In
Plymouth, and in the hamlet of Mecosta in the "stump country" of
central Michigan, Kirk lived and grew to young adulthood. A
romantic tradition­alist by instinct, as it were, he came early
to share his father's prejudices against the "assembly-line
civili­zation" already penetrating Michigan under the aegis of
Henry Ford.

Kirk was a shy boy, bookish, and precocious. By the
impressionable age of eight he was devouring the novels of the man
he later called his "literary mentor," Sir Walter Scott. The
imprint on the boy's imagination was indelible. By the time he was
ten (he tells us), he had read all of the works of Victor Hugo,
Charles Dickens, and Mark Twain. By the time he was a teenager,
Kirk's cast of mind was fixed. Growing up almost as an only child
(his one sibling, a sister, was seven years younger), he lived in a
world of old houses, old villages, old books, and elderly
relatives, many of whom believed in spirits and ghosts.

After graduating from high school in 1936, Kirk entered Michigan
State College (now Michigan State University), whose spirit of
"conformity," util­itarianism, and "dim animosity toward
liberal edu­cation" grated against his sensibility. Possessing
little money (the Great Depression was still on), he lived
frugally, subsisting much of the time on a diet of peanut butter
and crackers, and graduated as a his­tory major in 1940.

For the next year, Kirk was a graduate student in history at
Duke University, where he wrote a mas­ter's thesis later
published as Randolphof Roanoke. In it he
clearly sympathized with the ante­bellum Virginian's
aristocratic, states' rights agrari­anism. During this year,
the young scholar from Michigan began to get acquainted with the
conser­vative South. He read approvingly the Agrarian
manifesto, I'll Take My Stand. For the rest of his life he
considered himself a "Northern Agrarian."

In the summer of 1941, Kirk found himself working at Henry
Ford's Greenfield Village. Even before his experiences at the Ford
company, Kirk had developed a distaste for big business, big labor,
and big government. His year or so at Ford did nothing to change
his attitude. Indeed, his dislike of bureaucracy and what he called
federal "para­sites" was, if anything, increasing. He denounced
the military draft as "slavery." He published his first scholarly
article, in which he advocated a return to "Jeffersonian
principles." All in all, his was the Midwestern libertarian
conservatism of Senator Robert Taft.

Kirk's drifting ended abruptly in August 1942 when he was
drafted into the Army. For nearly four years he lived in the
desolate wastes of Utah (and, later, at a camp in Florida) as a
sergeant in the Chemical Warfare Service. In one respect, Kirk's
wartime experience proved to be invaluable: As a clerk with largely
routine duties, he found a large amount of time to read. And read
he did-Albert Jay Nock's Memoirs, Chesterton's
Orthodoxy, Irving Babbitt's Democracy and
Leadership, the political thought of Walter Bagehot, and
countless classics of English and ancient literature.

After his discharge from the Army in 1946, Kirk was appointed an
assistant professor of his­tory at his alma mater, Michigan
State. On the side, he founded and operated a used book store. But
the young scholar with antiquarian interests was not long for the
world of East Lansing. In 1948, Kirk-who was partly Scottish by
ances­try-undertook doctoral studies at St. Andrews University
in Scotland. In 1952, he earned the university's Doctor of Letters
degree-the only American ever to do so.

Years at St. Andrews
The years 1948 to 1952 were more than just a time of intensive
study, however. In many ways they set the mold for the rest of
Kirk's career. Already deeply attached to rural and ancestral ways,
and already an Anglophile in his literary tastes, Kirk fell deeply
in love with his ancestral homeland. There, he became a connoisseur
of ancient castles, old country houses, and the lore of old St.
Andrews. There, and in rural England, which he avidly explored on
foot, he found "the metaphysical prin­ciple of continuity given
visible reality." There, Rus­sell Kirk found a way to live.
Some years later, he himself became a country squire, as we shall
see, recreating at the old family house in Mecosta some­thing
of the lifestyle he had cherished in Scotland. Not without reason
did he come to refer to himself as "the last bonnet laird of the
stump country."

The St. Andrews experience affected Kirk in another way: It
powerfully reinforced his staunchly classical philosophy of
education. Reflecting some years later upon his St. Andrews days,
when he had lived in a garret and skimped on the consumption of
food, he wrote:

It is good for a student to be poor. Getting and spending, the
typical American college stu­dent lays waste his powers. Work
and contem­plation don't mix, and university days ought to be
days of contemplation.

For the rest of his life, Kirk held unswervingly to his approach
to higher education, embodied in St. Andrews, and excoriated the
decadence symbolized for him by Michigan State.

In still another way, St. Andrews left an indelible imprint upon
this highly imaginative young man. Even before he arrived in
Scotland, Kirk knew-as he later wrote-that "Mine was not an
Enlightened mind." It was (he said), "a Gothic mind, medieval in
its temper and structure."

I did not love cold harmony and perfect regu­larity of
organization; what I sought was vari­ety, mystery, tradition,
the venerable, the awful. I despised sophisters and calculators; I
was groping for faith, honor, and prescriptive loyalties. I would
have given any number of neo-classical pediments for one poor
battered gargoyle.

In misty, medieval St. Andrews and the Scottish countryside,
Kirk found enough to nourish his imagination for the remainder of
his life. His later gothic novel, Old House of Fear, was
set in Scotland. It sold more copies than all his other books put
together.

Finally, it was at St. Andrews University that Kirk
discovered-or, more precisely, discovered more deeply-the great
intellectual hero of his life: Edmund Burke. To Kirk's Midwestern,
grassroots, American conservatism, and to his "aristocratic"
literary humanism, was now added another layer of thought: Burkean
traditionalism, which Kirk acclaimed as "the true school of
conservative princi­ple." Burke's writings formed the basis for
his doc­toral dissertation, which was published in 1953 as
The Conservative Mind.

Giving Conservatives an Identity
Of the detailed substance of Kirk's book, I will say little, since
most of you, I presume, have already read it. But its significance
for American conserva­tism deserves further comment. What Kirk
did was to demonstrate that intelligent conservatism was not a mere
smokescreen for selfishness. It was an attitude toward life with
substance and moral force of its own. A century earlier, John
Stuart Mill had dismissed conservatives as "the stupid party." In
1950, an eminent American literary critic had dared to assert that
liberalism was "the sole intellectual tradition in the United
States." After the appearance of The Conservative Mind,
the American intellectual landscape assumed a different shape.
Kirk's tour de force breached the wall of liberal condescension. He
made it respectable for sophisticated people to iden­tify
themselves as men and women of the Right.

Above all, The Conservative Mind stimulated the
development of a self-consciously conservative in­tellectual
movement in America in the early years of the Cold War. In the
words of the book's publisher, Henry Regnery, Kirk gave an
"amorphous, scattered" opposition to liberalism an "identity."

All this was a remarkable accomplishment for a single volume by
a little-known author in 1953. The magnitude of Kirk's achievement
becomes even more impressive when we observe that The
Conservative Mind was not, in the conventional sense, a
political book. In its 450 pages he laid out no elaborate agenda
for legislation. Instead, he tire­lessly reminded his readers
that political problems were fundamentally "religious and moral
prob­lems" and that social regeneration was a goal which
required action at levels beyond the political and economic. This
is one reason why The Conservative Mind has outlived the
special circumstances of its birth: It focuses our attention on
ends and not just on means.

Kirk did this, moreover, by fearlessly grounding his
conservatism in religion, particularly Christian­ity. In an age
of predominantly secular public dis­course, he unabashedly
spoke of the soul and of his conviction that God rules society. In
an age of the growing hegemony of the social sciences, he
defi­antly quoted poetry and wrote ghostly fiction with a moral
twist. Indeed, I can think of no conservative in the past half
century who resorted as frequently as did Kirk to works of
literature to buttress his social and political commentary. You
will find abun­dant evidence of this in the volume we are
helping to launch today.

The author of The Conservative Mind was not indifferent
to the worldly concerns of politics and economics. A little later
in his career, for example, he helped to launch the
Goldwater-for-President movement. But fundamentally, Kirk realized
that political activism was not his calling. He was, rather, a
moralist and man of letters whose vocation, as he saw it, was to
remind us, in Robert Frost's words, of "the truths we keep coming
back and back to."

The Bohemian Tory
It was to these truths that Kirk returned, in more ways than one,
in 1953. In that year-the very year he became an academic
celebrity-Kirk coura­geously resigned his teaching position at
Michigan State-appalled, he wrote, by the administration's
deliberate dumbing down of educational standards. (The president of
the university at the time had only one earned degree: a Bachelor
of Science degree in poultry husbandry. Kirk disparaged him as a
"chick­enologist.") Preferring "unsalaried independence" (as he
put it) to the corrupting mediocrity of Aca­deme, he took up
the uncertain life of a professional writer and lecturer. Declining
a host of academic job offers, he instead went back to remote
Mecosta, Michigan (pop. 200)-and to the old family house on Piety
Hill, to live with his widowed grandmother and two maiden great
aunts.

In his history of National Review published last year,
Professor Jeffrey Hart, who knew Kirk, described him as a
"self-invented work of art, pro­digiously learned." By the
mid-1950s his distinctive persona seemed complete. Not yet married,
the peripatetic bachelor proudly called himself a "Bohe­mian
Tory." He defined a bohemian as "a wandering and often impecunious
man of letters or arts, indif­ferent to the demands of
bourgeois fad and foible." He hated television, which he called
"Demon TV." He refused to drive an automobile, which he labeled a
"mechanical Jacobin."

It is entirely possible that Kirk would have remained a
brilliant, if somewhat reclusive, social critic, writing for
literary journals and Sunday sup­plements, had not William F.
Buckley Jr. come call­ing in Mecosta in 1955. Buckley was about
to launch a conservative magazine called National Review,
and he wanted Kirk to write a regular col­umn for it. To
Buckley's delight, Kirk immediately agreed to do so. But to
Buckley's dismay, his host refused to be identified on the
magazine's masthead as one of its editors. And therein hangs a tale
which illuminates much about modern American conser­vatism and
Kirk's place in it.

Rivals for Intellectual Leadership
For in 1955, Kirk's Burkeanism was not the only school of
right-wing thought vying for prom­inence. Another intellectual
tendency, known in those days as "classical liberalism" or
"individual­ism" but generally known to us today as
libertari­anism, was also stirring in the United States. Among
its adherents, broadly speaking, were such free-market economists
as Friedrich Hayek, Lud­wig von Mises, and Milton Friedman, and
the novelist Ayn Rand.

To Russell Kirk, "true conservatism"-Burke's conservatism-was
utterly antithetical to unre­strained capitalism and the
egoistic ideology of indi­vidualism. "Individualism is social
atomism," he exclaimed; "conservatism is community of spirit."
Spiritually, he said, individualism was a "hideous solitude." On
one occasion Kirk even criticized "individualism" as
anti-Christian. No one, he assert­ed, could logically be a
Christian and an individual­ist at the same time.

Such sentiments, which Kirk expressed with gusto in The
Conservative Mind and elsewhere, did not exactly endear him to
libertarians. Nor did his frequent fulminations against classical
liberalism and the gospel of Progress. In 1955, the editor of the
libertarian Freeman magazine, a man named Frank Chodorov,
commissioned a critical article on Kirk and his so-called new
conservatism. The author of the article was an argumentative
libertarian (and former Communist) named Frank Meyer. The
trou­ble with Kirk and his allies, said Meyer, was a lack of
grounding in "clear and distinct principle." For all the froth and
evocative tone of their writings, they failed utterly to provide a
crisp analytic framework for opposing the real
enemy-collectivism-that was threatening to engulf us all. Kirk had
no stan­dards, said Meyer, no principle for distinguishing
between what was good and bad in the status quo. Meyer was
additionally angered by Kirk's sweeping condemnation of
"individualism." The fiery ex-rad­ical, who believed that
"all value resides in the indi­vidual," felt that Kirk
did not comprehend the principles and institutions of a free
society. To underscore the point, Meyer's attack on Kirk was given
the title "Collectivism Rebaptized."

For Kirk, such an assault was disagreeable, if not surprising,
considering its source. Far more disturb­ing to him was what
transpired next. As it hap­pened, Kirk in 1955 was in the
process of founding his own magazine-Modern Age-when
Meyer's blast appeared. Someone-Kirk believed it was either Meyer
or Chodorov-sent a copy of Meyer's critical article to every member
of Kirk's board of advisors. To Kirk this was a blatant attempt to
undercut him with his sponsors and perhaps kill Modern Age
in its womb. So when Kirk learned that Buckley intended to publish
Meyer and Chodorov in National Review, the Bohemian Tory
declined to be listed on the masthead as an editor. He was not
about to accept any appearance of responsibility for publishing the
likes of Chodorov and Meyer, whom he labeled "the Supreme Soviet of
Libertarianism." And when Kirk discovered that Chodorov and
Mey­er had been placed on the new magazine's mast­head, he
ordered Buckley to remove his own name from that page, where he had
been briefly listed as an associate and contributor. Kirk vowed
that though he might write for the same magazine as Meyer and
Chodorov, he would not be "cheek by jowl with them in the
masthead."

Buckley, who was trying to forge conservatism's diverse elements
into a coalition, was perturbed. He insisted that Meyer was not out
to "get" Kirk and undermine his influence-although Kirk had what he
considered evidence to the contrary. But Kirk did not relent. For
the next 25 years, he wrote steadily for National
Review-in fact, wrote more for it, I believe, than any other
person except possibly Buckley himself. But he did not add his name
to its masthead. He remained in National Review but not
quite of it.

It is not possible to give you here a full account of the
subsequent feud (as some have called it) between Kirk and Frank
Meyer. So far as I know, they never met nor fully reconciled,
though they did correspond and did, I think, develop a measure of
respect for each other. Interestingly, each became a convert to
Roman Catholicism-Kirk in 1964 and Meyer on his deathbed in 1972.
Perhaps, in the end, they were not so far apart as it seemed.

Nevertheless, for a long time they personified the two
polarities in postwar conservative thought: Meyer the
arch-libertarian, for whom freedom to choose was the highest
political good, and Kirk the arch-traditionalist, who sought to
instruct his read­ers on the proper choices. The important
point is that the difference between them was more than personal.
Other conservative intellectuals in the 1950s and beyond were also
disturbed by Kirk's seemingly nostalgic and indiscriminate yearning
for a pre-modern world. Kirk's repeated invocation of "the wisdom
of our ancestors" was no doubt useful, the conservative scholar
Richard Weaver remarked on one occasion, but the question was:
which ancestors? "After all," said Weaver, "Adam is our
ancestor.... If we have an ancestral legacy of wis­dom, we have
also an ancestral legacy of folly...."

Nor was Meyer the only rival with whom Kirk had to contend for
intellectual leadership of the emerging conservative movement.
Another was the political scientist Willmoore Kendall, who had been
one of Buckley's mentors at Yale. Never a man to shy from a rough
and tumble argument, Kendall openly repudiated what he called the
"Burke 'cultists'"- above all, Russell Kirk. Privately, Kendall
called his own book The Conservative Affirmation (1963) a
"declaration of war" against Kirk.

To Kendall, Kirk's limitations as a conservative teacher were
several. Kirk wrote (said Kendall) "with an eye too much to Burke
and not enough to the Framers" of the American Constitution. He had
insufficient grasp of American conservatism and the
American tradition, particularly as explicated by The
Federalist Papers. He was "too far above the fray" and too
lacking in clarity about the actual issues in the ongoing
liberal-conservative "war" to serve as a good guide to the
conservative "resistance." Kendall also objected to what he called
Kirk's "defeatism"- his sense that contemporary conservatism was
fighting a noble but losing battle. In truth, Kendall countered,
the conservative cause (properly under­stood) had not been
routed at all-certainly not in the political arena, where, in his
view, the real battles between Right and Left were being fought.
Privately, Kendall contrasted Kirk's "literary" conser­vatism
with his own "marketplace conservatism, not very elegant."

So much for Kirk's critics on the Right. Suffice it to say here
that from the mid-1950s forward Kirk responded vigorously to the
challenges hurled against his formulation of the conservative
creed. Toward doctrinaire libertarianism (especially as expounded
by someone like Ayn Rand), he remained utterly uncompromising. It
was, he declared in the 1980s, "as alien to real American
conservatism as is communism." It was "an ideology of universal
selfishness," and he added: "We flawed human creatures are
sufficiently selfish already, without being exhorted to pursue
selfishness on principle." To those who asserted that his Burkean
conservatism was insufficiently principled and mired in historical
contingency, he reinterpreted Edmund Burke as a thinker in the
"natural law" tra­dition-a tradition transcending national
borders and changing social conditions. To those who thought that
Kirk slighted the role of reason in his defense of what he called
the Permanent Things, he increasingly grounded his insights on what
he called the moral imagination. To those who dispar­aged his
conservatism as an alien hothouse plant, he reaffirmed Burke's
intellectual influence on Ameri­can statesmen and emphasized
the pre-modern roots of American order. Repeatedly, for example, he
highlighted the most conservative features of the American war for
independence and its culminating achievement, the Constitution.

It is sometimes said that as men become old, they revert to the
political mindset of their youth. In the final decade of his life,
Kirk, it seems to me, returned more overtly-at least in his
politics-to the noninterventionist, Taftite, bedrock
conserva­tism of his boyhood. He did so, in part, under the
stress of the growing quarrel between the so-called
neoconservatives and their traditionalist right-wing critics, the
most militant of whom took the label of paleoconservatives. In this
imbroglio, which still continues today, a number of Kirk's friends,
such as M. E. Bradford, were firmly in the paleoconservative camp,
and toward it Kirk tended to gravitate. In 1988, in a controversial
address at The Heritage Foundation, he mixed considerable praise
for the neoconservatives with mordant criticism. The next year he
permitted his name to go on the masthead of the paleoconservative
monthly, Chronicles, where it remained for approximately
three years until he took it off. In 1991 he condemned the first
Gulf War as an arrogant and imprudent "war for an oil-can." The
next year he served as chairman of Patrick Buchanan's presidential
campaign in Michigan.

In general, though, Kirk tried to stay aloof from the factional
infighting that was once again afflicting the Right. Early in his
career, he had described him­self as one who played "a lone
hand," and to a con­siderable extent he succeeded. It is one
reason why, at his death in 1994, he was so widely respected by his
fellow conservatives.

The Benevolent Sage of Mecosta
There was another reason for this respect, which I must touch upon
before closing. In 1964, at the age of almost 46, Russell Kirk
married. In the next 11 years he became the father of four
daughters. With his new station in life came new duties; as he
remarked in his memoirs, "married men require money." The years
ahead brought little diminution in the pace of his intellectual
activity, nor could there be, with a growing family to support. In
a 12-month period between mid-1967 and mid-1968, for example, he
delivered about 150 lectures around the country.

Although married life imposed new obligations on Kirk, it also
created new opportunities to in­crease his influence on
American conservatism. With Annette as his helpmeet, the Bohemian
Tory evolved into a Tory squire and paterfamilias: the laird of
Piety Hill. Willmoore Kendall privately called him "the Benevolent
Sage of Mecosta"-a designation I think Kirk would have enjoyed.

And like all sages, he attracted inquiring students to his door.
With the assistance of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, he
held periodic conferences- called Piety Hill seminars-at his home
in Mecosta: scores of them over a period of 20 years. According to
Annette, a total of two thousand students and professors
participated in these events. For some it was a life-changing
experience. With the help of the Wilbur Foundation, the impecunious
refugee from what he called Behemoth University created his own
informal campus in Mecosta-an endeavor that persists today in the
Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal. If he had not married,
probably none of this would have happened, and his impact on
American conservatism would have been less.

What, finally, may we say about Kirk's place in the galaxy of
American conservatism? First, a word about his message. More than
any other conserva­tive writer of his era, he elevated the tone
and sub­stance of conservative discourse. As Gregory Wolfe has
put it, he was a "bridge-builder" to "the classics of our culture."
Whatever we may think about his interpretation of Burke, or of the
American Revolu­tion, or of any other past or present
controversy, Kirk's legacy as a moralist endures. He elevated our
discourse-and our vision.

Secondly, a word about the messenger. Kirk's anti-modern persona
did not win universal appro­bation on the American Right. It
attracted some and repelled others. And it raised a perennial
challenge for those who would propagate his teachings: namely, how
adversarial toward modernity can one become without losing one's
ability to influence one's fellow men and women? We might call this
the dilemma of traditionalist conservatism in untradi­tional
times.

Here Kirk himself gave us a clue on how to resolve it. In the
words of an old Christian hymn, "This is My Father's World."
Russell Kirk knew this, and because of that, he never withdrew
bit­terly into a "hideous solitude." He never gave up on
communicating with the world around him. "This is My Father's
World," and as Kirk liked to say, cheerfulness keeps breaking in.
He did not let his critique of modernity lead him into the Slough
of Despond.

Of Kirk's career, it can well be said that he took the road less
traveled by. No doubt he paid a price for his independence-in
diminished income, in caricature at times, and in lost prestige
among the American professoriate. And yet his labors bore fruit, as
this scintillating volume, The Essential Russell Kirk,
attests.

In a way, Kirk's life illustrates the truth of a remark
attributed to the historian Peter Viereck: "If you stand still long
enough, sooner or later you're avant-garde." Russell Kirk did not
stand still all his life, but on the issues that truly mattered he
stood his ground. And because he did, we, his grateful heirs, can
carry on.

George H. Nash is Senior Fellow at the Russell Kirk Center
for Cultural Renewal and President of the Philadelphia Society. He
is the author of The Conserva­tive Intellectual Movement
in America Since 1945, 30th Anniversary Edition (Wilmington,
Del.: ISI Books, 2006).